DENTSPLY Caulk Responds to Dentists’ Preferences

For many years, DENTSPLY Caulk has been at the forefront in most of the direct restorative categories, says Danny Vezmar, senior brand manager for direct restoratives. "We’ve got a great, dedicated team of people here. From research and development to continuing education to marketing to customer service, everybody’s driving to support one goal—how can we provide the solutions to make the dentist’s—and the patient’s—life better."

The key to the company’s success is its continual research to understand what dentists needs for composite restoration. "We call it the voice of customer. We are always reaching out to dentists trying to understand exactly how they do things today and where their major stress points are. What are the issues that we can fix? For example, technique sensitivity of composites is critical, so we focus on how to make composite restorations easier for the clinician."

For all Caulk-manufactured and marketed composite materials, the company controls the process from start to finish. "We make all our own resins, mill our glass, salinate everything—we truly own the process from beginning to end," Vezmar says.

Caulk offers a broad range of composites: three different universal composites, two distinct posterior composites, and a portfolio of flowable composites. "With our experience, we know there’s not one silver-bullet solution for every dentist in the United States," he explains. "Dentists have different needs and different pReferences, and we make every effort to support them by making sure we have something available that fits with the way they like to practice direct restorative dentistry.

"At Caulk, we are spending a lot of our effort on the continued development of resin chemistries, because the resin plays such a critical part in the success of the restoration," Vezmar adds. "We will continue down the path of low-stress restorative materials, because they provide some unique benefits to the dentist in terms of placement."

As an example of the company’s advances in composite materials, Vezmar points to the recent success of SureFil® SDR® flow, which is a unique, proprietary stress-decreasing resin developed at Caulk. "It provides some very nice low-stress advantages, and that is a platform that we believe could have a lot of potential across other restorative categories. In the year that it has been on the market, SureFil SDR flow has received a lot of acclaim from reporting agencies and from key opinion leaders. Our customers can be confident that there is a lot of support behind the product."

Customers also rely on the company’s accessible technical support. "One of the great things about Caulk is our staff of technical service reps," Vezmar says. "If a dentist has a patient in the chair and needs to ask a question, whatever it may be, we’ve got a team here that can answer those types of on-the-spot questions. Of course, that applies to any Caulk product, not just the composites. That is one thing our customers tell us they appreciate—they know they can call us with any question at any time and get the right answer."